[WikiEN-l] Cheese Dreams/proposal for a new policy

Sat Feb 5 19:23:12 UTC 2005

Rhobite wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 08:50:51 -0800, Nicholas Knight
> <nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
> 
>>Contact her ISP. If you can't get them to drop her, call the upstream
>>provider(s). If that doesn't work, block every IP range associated with
>>the ISP and tell anyone affected to complain to the ISP. Wikipedia is
>>getting big, it's time to start throwing some weight around when users
>>are engaging in wildly abusive activities.
> 
> 
> That's one way to do it. At some point, someone official may want to
> contact BT and see about getting her warned, although it's hard to

BT? As in British Telecom? That's terrific! More customers means more 
complaints and more bad publicity.

> believe that they'll drop her from the service for this. The tactics
> you describe are used by the anti-spam movement, but is her conduct as
> damaging as that of a spammer? Assuming that BT doesn't drop her, is
> Wikipedia prepared to embrace the "collateral damage" philosophy of
> the antispammers? It's controversial. I won't get into the pro/con
> arguments, but the debate is pretty heated. I'm not sure if this

I'm familiar with the debate in anti-spam circles, and I fall into 
roughly the middle (blocking of an entire ISP should be used only in the 
most extreme cases where the ISP clearly has no interest in stemming the 
tide of spam). We're not cutting off a major avenue of day-to-day 
communication here, though. We're trying to write an encyclopedia.

> response fits in with Wikipedia's philosophy. Blocking all BT dialups
> would block many legitimate users.

Which is exactly the point. Legitimate users will dislike being blocked, 
and we'll direct their wrath to the appropriate party: the irresponsible 
ISP.

At this point, Wikipedia has NO paid staff, and may well never have any 
real paid staff other than sysadmins and/or devs. Volunteers are going 
to get sick of not getting anywhere with abusive users.

I'm sure I'm not the only one whose editing has significantly dropped 
off because every time they come across a page they might be able to 
contribute something to, they have to worry about POV warriors and other 
uncooperative users that effective action is never taken against.

It's just going to get worse, and as legitimate users get fed up and 
leave, people like CD will turn Wikipedia into a laughing stock.

Either tough and effective action is taken, or Wikipedia is going to die.

[WikiEN-l] Cheese Dreams/proposal for a *new* policy

[WikiEN-l] Cheese Dreams/proposal for a new policy